In Which It Is Now In Harsh Color

Office Hours

by JULIA CLARKE

"How shockable are you?" he asked. I was seated in my professor's office one winter day, sipping black coffee and discussing the prospect of graduate school. In the English department, at least at my alma mater, meeting with a professor for a chat is not unusual; in fact, it's recommended, especially if you're considering a PhD in English. Having a mentor who knows you well can be the key to admission, but it also assuages the agony of working toward a career in the humanities, a field that is notoriously overlooked and underfunded, especially in a lackluster economy. 

That day, the conversation shifted from standard evaluations of choice programs to literature in general to something personal — something dark and secret — that I wasn't sure I wanted to hear.  Was I shockable? Since starting college, with its STDs, keg stands, and recreational drugs just a house party away, I liked to tell people that nothing shocked me anymore, but then again, I was only 20 and privately knew better. 

"Um, I don't know," I stammered. It was one of those moments — flashbulb memories, psychologists call them — that you recall with piercing vividness because of its inevitable impact on your life.  The wise, clean-cut and closed-off professor, clad in tweed and lecturing from the Bible despite departmental taboos, was about to expose his worst weakness.

"I had a relationship with a student that lasted two years," he said calmly.  It ended in 2004.  She was his assistant and about 40 years his junior, a girl who already had a boyfriend her own age but who somehow felt compelled to sleep with a married man technically old enough to be her grandfather.

In my attempts to be well-liked, to be thought of as free, open-minded, and most importantly, an intellectual, I told myself it was perfectly natural for an elderly professor to seduce a student. Words are inflammatory, and they shared a passion for literature. It's the age-old university tale: I wasn't really a fan of it, but I got it. 

Shortly after his confession, he pulled out an envelope tucked behind some papers in a file cabinet.  "Let's just — close this door—" he said, gently pulling the entry door shut, and then in the quiet seclusion of his immaculate office, cluttered his desk with pictures of her so that I could place a face to a name.

No longer was his affair something nostalgically and distantly described, as if read from Nabokov: It was now in harsh color, with youthful brown hair and friendly eyes, staring back at me. It wasn't just one, either. He sifted through the envelope's contents with a practiced hand, dropping photograph after photograph of women he slept with starting in 1966, when he earned his PhD.  He was no longer the distinguished research professor I admired but instead a crusty Casanova, boasting to a friend his sordid parade of conquests. 

Girls were captured smiling and windswept; others were serious, with crossed ankles and austere faces; one posed nude. They were all beautiful. Out of all the images, though, the one that disturbed me the most featured a dark-haired student, one of his favorite affairs, in the 1990s. She was photographed on a nondescript couch, her thin legs comfortably tucked behind her, intently reading a book.  Seeing her like that — so casual, so young, so unaware of the camera’s invasive gaze — made me queasy.  He told me they hadn't spoken for years, and I wondered if she still thought of him, if she regretted the affair, and how hard it was to overcome its demise. 

He was her first lover — he shared that with revolting pride — and I considered how damaging that is to young college student.  What's it like to have your first real romance be someone who so easily overpowered you with age, postgraduate degrees, and published books, not to mention the morbid promise of an end? "I'm married for life," he said, pointing a fat finger at his gold ring, but it felt like mockery, to the students he slept with and to his wife who bore him children.  What is marriage if not fidelity?  

I have been told more than once that I have uncanny composure, seldom revealing my real feelings.  Keep calm and carry on, Her Majesty says, and I make it my mantra.  In this case, though, as I flipped through pictures of women who seemed normal, happy, and most profoundly, young — too young to be in bed with a man well into the autumn of life — I still have no idea what my face looked like.  "Are you okay?" he asked, to which I replied coolly, "Yep, I'm fine." "You're always fine," he said darkly, and I'm sure I reddened. 

We didn't talk much more about his past lovers after that; the photographs and accompanying histories were something I blocked from my immediate consciousness, turning instead to enlightening discussions about literature, God, his sickly mother, his grandchildren and children, art, music, Paris, England.  We met regularly, my black coffee always patiently waiting on the other side of his desk, and we e-mailed too. 

He taught me literature so well and so easily that I refused to see him for what he was, a man with authority who took advantage of his impressionable students. Instead, he was an accomplished savant who surprisingly respected me despite the department's jaded tendencies.  He might be weird, but nobody would deny he was both bright and prolific, and he treated me as an intellectual equal. "I must tell you that your e-mails are beautifully literate," he wrote once in February.  I was flattered.

In the midst of our meetings and correspondence, I was writing a paper on King Lear, and I wondered if he were my own King Lear, mystically transported from Shakespeare's ancient England to Florida's muggy reality. Like Lear, my professor was a tired old man seeking an outlet — a cold and non-discriminating heath — for his past transgressions, so that he could, as Shakespeare penned, "unburdened, crawl toward death." Maybe this relationship, however strange, was happening to me so that I could understand aging better, or at the very least so that I could write a good paper on a play that troubled me above all the others.  

Once, King Lear came up in conversation, specifically the scene where Lear announces he'll give the most generous slice of his kingdom to the daughter who loves him most. Cordelia, Lear's favorite, professes she loves him only "according to her bond," and her honesty sends Lear into a maddened rage. 

"Should Cordelia really have been honest with poor old King Lear?" my professor asked, but he swiftly answered for me, "Lear did not want the truth — he wanted kindness." Was that valid? When life has harried him for several decades, was there a point where I should just accept bad behavior and indeed, commend it with kindness, just because he lasted this long? 

My professor needed an understanding and silent ear, someone who wouldn't tell him what was true but instead serve as his bucket, swallowing his past and assuring him it was all okay with my modest shrugs and slow nods.  "I hope you enjoy keeping this secret as much as I do," he told me once, no doubt fearful I would broadcast his confessions.  It made me feel strong, set apart even:  I wasn't connected to it; I was containing it.

But then, ineluctably, he tried sucking me into his queue of sad affairs, gradually at first and later with aggressive insistence, sending me erotic poetry in e-mails, telling me I was lovely in the warm sunlight where we sometimes met to talk, comparing me to his past lovers. He even requested — jokingly? — a picture of me in a swimsuit to add to his ignoble envelope. "You are quite the embodiment of springtime," he wrote. 

I ignored all of it, mechanically and with tenacity.  He admired my clean refusal to acknowledge his compliments and trespasses. "You are a very wise — instinctively wise — woman," he said, but he was relentless. When he told me he loved me, I finally demanded that he stop. "I was hurt by your e-mail," he said, and his vulnerability sickened me. Correspondence puttered on for a brief time after that, although it was now jagged and noticeably tense. 

In June, I traveled to Washington to celebrate my 21st birthday with my sister.  "Let me hear from you when you get back," he wrote. Maybe it was that I was now 21 — too old and also too young to deal with his messy inner life — but reading that sentence laden with pathetic desperation, I knew that I couldn't talk to him anymore. I sent a terse response, abruptly ending communication.

Years later, I still don't know what the point of it all was. I count myself lucky that nothing physical ever happened (not even a handshake, he once pointed out) but his leers and his poetry were nearly as disruptive. Literature, my first real love, suddenly felt murky and uncomfortable, with its varying justifications for any and all action.  I desperately wanted to see, in print, that some things really are right and wrong, but I was tirelessly left heartbroken. 

I often thought about the girls he did manage to sleep with, particularly the one reading in the photograph. I'm sure that like me, she was blinded by his glittering analyses of art and text, and her self-doubts, like mine, were overshadowed by his crafty adulations. She just paid a higher price.  Without his frequent affirmations, my insecurities returned, and the worst question of all came rushing forth: Was he complimentary because he wanted to bed us, or did he really think we were smart? 

But time heals most wounds, or at least makes us forget the worst parts. I still wrote my honors thesis, still graduated, and still devour and study the literature I've always adored. Now, hundreds of miles from my college campus, I live and work in a city where I sometimes see short, mustached men in scholarly blazers, and I shudder, thinking it's him. It never is.

Julia Clarke is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. This is her first appearance in these pages. Paintings by Joan Brown.

"In The Same Room" - Julia Holter (mp3)

"Four Gardens" - Julia Holter (mp3)

In Which They Were A Lovely Couple

ghada amer, "Trini", 2005

Ready For Me

by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON

We’re lying and talking in bed, and the late afternoon sun stretches long into the room.

But you know, childhood is extending. Thirty is really young now, you know? he's saying. We have time.

You think you have time. We have the same amount of life as ever, and it isn’t much.

Oh, don’t be dour. You mean, what? Like we feel young just because we like automatically adjust and seek older and older elders?

Well, yes, actually. And also like, I don’t know. You’re a man; you can take fifteen more years to find yourself, you can wait til you’re forty and get married whenever you want. In that way I’ll age faster than you, I say, and he nods gravely, patiently, like a teenager during an unending wedding speech.

Don’t you wish you were a kid again? I ask, then realize I’m being cruel: if he agrees, he’s being a Millennial baby; if he disagrees, he’s lying — because don’t we all wish for this? Or at least, don’t we all wish to cycle between ten and twenty-five, then snap right back again?

He pauses, then: I wish I was a kid, with you.

I think about it. When I was a kid I was catching dragonflies (buzzing in my clenched hands like little machines) and frogs (until one, plopped triumphantly in a bucket filled with water, went fleshy and dead in the white noon sun.) And what else? I had a broken front tooth for years, I masturbated with pens. I was once so in love with Star Wars I thought I would die if I stopped.

I don’t think we’d have been friends, I say, but he as he rolls his big body over and up, throwing his legs over the bed and squeezing his armpits shut, I feel how wrong this is.

I sit up beside him. We’d have been friends, I say. I’d have made you marry me in my backyard playhouse. Then maybe we’d have hot dogs.

We’d have cared for each other, he says, because we like each other now, and people don’t really change. I run into people all the time when I visit home, and even if I haven’t seen them since we were seven, there’s still this little hidden grain of themselves that kind of...radiates outwards. I recognize them right away.

I mean, listen — I wish we’d been friends, I say. I was too shy to make friends, and then when I figured out how, I only picked rotten people. Like Tara — we ran into her like two weeks ago. Remember, I ran out of the store?

He looked down at me and I looked up at him, imagining us little. My red-headed husband, seven hands high.

ghada amer, "The Roses" 2002 Maybe childhood is always a little lonely and frightening; bursts of anxiety and surprise and delight peppering long, long stretches of nighttimes, parental dinners, and Sunday afternoons. I remember the first day I slept at Tara’s house as late fall, but it wasn’t. It was freshly May, the breathless time before the insects and the blankets of heat, and plump unsheathed maple leaves were shivering all along the street. We sat on the sidewalk curb and she dragged circles in the junky rain-soaked maple blossoms, and I watched her talk, amazed at the body glitter sparkling on her downy arms. "My dad only watches war movies," she was saying. "They have him in Latvia now, and he’s using like machine guns and stuff. But he’ll be back in six months, and you’ll see – he looks out for me. When we go out for Halloween, he’ll follow us a block behind."

I nodded — "My dad looks out for me too." She frowned, and I felt that lonely coldness again: we didn’t really like each other, I understood that then. But we had nobody else.

She stood up. "Let’s eat," she said.

The kitchen was cool and dark, and I knew that the rest of the house was dark too, and that Tara’s mother would sleep upstairs until probably the next morning. She wrenched open the fridge and put a plate on the table — engraved with knife marks, it looked like china but was actually plastic, like the plates at Swiss Chalet. "I’ll feed you, OK?" she said.

She opened the Styrofoam containers of leftover Thai food — slick crunchy mango slices peppered with ground nuts, and chicken globs set in thick cold peanut sauce, and chalky rice perfectly shaped to the inside of its container — splatting it out on the plate, saying Eat, now — and I did. She threw open the cupboard doors, pulling out dried apricots and sleeves of crackers, dipping them in cream cheese and margarine and getting it on her fingers after a while, passing them to me, and I kept eating, not stopping, unbuttoning my pants a little as the weak cloudy May afternoon trickled into the kitchen. And then ice cream, bending the spoon and freezing my teeth in my haste, and then apples when there was nothing left, breaking their skins over and over, spreading the white flesh under my meaty fingertips, crunching down to the seed-flaps, the wooden parts, and starting again, a new sick roundness in my palm, a gastronomic analogue to the hellish perpetuity of my childhood – inscrutable afternoons like this, lasting and lasting. The dead house air pressed in ocean-like on my ears as I listened to the rhythmic click of my own jaw. To this day I chase pleasure to lead myself into punishment, maybe to recapture the ill giving-up frisson of the sick stay-at-home days slung alongside days like this. She paused to throw away the ragged apple cores.

"Now you’ll have diabetes," she said.

Did she?
Did she what? I ask.
Have diabetes? Wait — no. That’s a dumb question, whatever. Continue.

We watched Halloween as I controlled my nausea and Tara made comments in a different-sounding voice, perhaps repeating things her dad had said as they’d watched the tattered VHS tape together ("It’s dumb because all her blood is drained out but she’s still flesh-colored," etc.), and right before bed we pressed our faces to her mother’s fish tank. "Look at the gourami," she said, pointing at the biggest, fattest, pearl-bodied fish, and I yelped. All the other fish were attacking it, darting and churning the water, eating its gauzy fins nearly away. We rescued it in a shallow bowl of water to die alone, leaving bright fin-flakes scudding at clay castle-level (she gave clipped directions, and I whimpered the whole time.) We peered into the bowl for a moment, watching its disc-like body spin gently as if with the momentum of its thwarted will to live, its little puff of life energy seeping in the dark. I thought about it dying as we lay chatting in our sleeping bags, its mouth still opening and closing with nobody downstairs to watch it, with no lights on. I started thinking about my parents, and began to cry.

"You're very sentimental," she said to me, her cold eyes assessing, and I took it first as a compliment, then later as an insult — but really it was neither. She was simply gauging the difference between her and I; the oozy sadness between my ears, clouding in front of me. Even then I understood that she’d shut off when nobody was there, that she could flick through people like books and create herself for them.

That's pretty precocious, he says, then thinks about it. You are very sentimental.
Better that than blank. I say.
There’s only two choices?
For me, maybe. I pause. Probably people can change a lot, if they want to.
Did she?
I laugh. Not a bit.

About two years ago I visited her house, for the last time — she shared a run-down home in Chinatown with four other people, girls whose personalities she’d merged and then dominated.

"You caught me in the shower," she sang through the half-open bathroom door, oozing steam and fragrance — "just make yourself at home." Reluctantly I walked past the bathroom into the kitchen — she was rubbing oil over her legs, her hair twined up in an elaborate towel. She grinned at me in the mirror, and I blushed: I didn’t mean to look, but I knew she wanted me to, to witness her perform her gleaming health, her luxurious youth. The sun whitened the whole kitchen, blazing through the grubby curtains, gleaming off a shifting mass of fruit flies hovering over the garbage. I filled a mug with lukewarm water. Christopher’s in the living room, she called through the door — go say hi, OK? My heart sank. OK, I said.

The old warped-up wood floor had creaked enormously as I walked, but Christopher, sitting with his knobby knees together, looked up from his laptop as if he was surprised. His twiglike, brittle-yet-potbellied body was sealed in a tight, tight blazer studded with pins (Get Bent, one of them said) and a silly hat, the kind with a brim in the front. The whole ensemble had a musty, mismatched Value Village feel (his most recent employment before he left Vancouver, whose clothing selection, he had claimed, was — as all things were — better than that of any Toronto locations). We said hello, and he patted the dingy cushion beside him. I sat, glancing furtively at his laptop screen. A dozen Microsoft Word documents were arranged across the desktop, a constellation of Millennial self-entitlement, all named things like ‘i tossed my smoke to the ground.doc’ and ‘she said, honey let’s go.doc’ and ‘belfast second ending, no victim.doc.’ "How’s the play going?" I asked.

He ignored the question. "She’s going to break up with me," he said. "Today, when you leave."

This was likely. "We’ll probably never see each other again," he added.

"You and I?" I asked, and he nodded, toying with his clumsily large lip ring, pouting his wet lips, making a sort of frozen expression I could tell he practised in the mirror.

"Well relationships, you know," I said, and then elaborated: "They don’t just end, sometimes they wear out and end like a couple times. You guys probably still have some time together, and maybe some of it will be really nice."

"I don’t think so," he said. "The thing is, she’s discovered she’s bisexual. She has to explore that."

Despite her enormous appetite for people — she wanted to claim and consume everyone, men and women, it didn’t matter — I knew this wasn’t true. Still, when she swept into the room, I felt my chest throb with sick excitement.

Shit like that cheapens real queerness, he says.
Exactly! I say, and he brightens.

Tara came in, her hair still twisted in the towel, and we chatted performatively about school, drinking, quitting drinking, smoking, quitting smoking, people we’d lost touch with, and people we were looking to shed. Christopher watched, sullen, rubbing her palm with both hands. Finally he said, "You know, it’s interesting about gossip. You need it for bonding, don’t you? Like, you and I have these things in common, we’re not like these other people, who are undesirable for reasons A, B, and C."

"Yeah," I said, and Tara rolled her eyes and went to the bathroom, and Christopher turned to me, radiating need. I got up — "I’m just going to grab more water" — and brought my empty mug to the kitchen, aching with pity. On my way back to the living room, I passed the bathroom again and caught Tara’s reflection in the mirror — she wasn’t ready for me this time. She was staring at her own face, the towel coming loose, her hair dripping out, her mouth hanging slack. Her arms hung limp and folded in the sink, like they weighed a hundred pounds, like she’d suddenly sprouted five extra feet of arm and was baffled by it. She looked overwhelmed, as if she knew she’d get lost on the way to adulthood, sensing she would, as my mother would say, grow up funny, lingering and fucking up and receiving parental rescue over and over, a child-monster in the body of a beautiful young woman. Her eyes snapped over to mine and she straightened up and smiled, but not before a spasm passed over her features. It could have been surprise — she was startled, she wasn’t expecting me. It could also have been hate.

"It’s awful when you just agree with people like that," she said. "He was being disparaging about women. You didn’t really mean it."

Christopher came tearing up the hall, his ears burning — "No I wasn’t!"

I thought about it, holding her gaze in the mirror. "At least that’s the worst thing about me," I said.

"Leave her alone," Christopher demanded.

"Oh, of course you’re defending her — you’re in love with her, aren’t you?" she said. "When you just agree and listen and smile and make things OK all the time — who wouldn’t love that? She’s blank. She’s nothing."

"You’re wrong," he said. (I hope he was.)

"Your hat is stupid," she said. (It was.)

"You’re getting fat," he returned. (She was.)

"You’re a loser," she spat. (He was.)

"You’re a bitch," he yelped, and she threw her hairdryer against the wall.

"You’re old as shit," she screamed. (He was — to be dating her, at least.)

"You’re living off your parents," he yelled. (She was, and would for years.)

"You’re wearing eyeliner!"

"No I’m not!" (He was.)

"I’m smarter than you!"

"No you’re not!" (She wasn’t.)

"Your writing is terrible," she said triumphantly, and there was silence. I wanted to say, no Tara, that’s too much, he needs this — working terrible jobs for years, forever, always feeling the discrepancy between his middle-class childhood and his hand-to-mouth, minimum-wage adult life, nursing its unfairness like a deep wound in soft flesh. Writing about it was his only release, producing linearity and a fervent but as yet imaginary bond with countless others, writing their own plays about grocery-store-working playwrights tragically stricken with writer’s block, toiling away at their own greasy-screened laptops, swollen with promise and yet to be found.

Victoria Hetherington is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about the only good thing. She is a writer living in Toronto. You can find her website here.

Images by Ghada Amer.

"Flutes" - Hot Chip (mp3)

"Now There Is Nothing" - Hot Chip (mp3)

The new album from Hot Chip is entitled In Our Heads, and it was released on June 6th.

In Which We Barely Bring A Change Of Clothes

Goodbye Station

by LUCY MORRIS

I was up at Grand Central the other day and walked by the line of airport shuttles on 42^nd Street, where I more than once deposited different boyfriends and where they more than once deposited me. I remembered in an instant the individual goodbyes we exchanged and the looks in their eyes — green, green, brown, brown — in those moments, and seeing my own eyes — blue reflected back in them.

That was all very good and edifying in its own way: there are nuances of life you are unable to sense until you’ve intertwined yours with someone else’s for some period. But none of it was as good and edifying as what’s been happening the last few months: there are just as many nuances you are unable to sense until you’ve made your life solely yours, assembled a set of routines and rituals and plans for which you alone are responsible.

I want to say all of this comes as a surprise but I’m afraid it doesn’t. I think deep down I always suspected it could get better than those greetings, those goodbyes, whatever pleasures came in between.

This is not to say I assumed it actually would.

+

For a while late last decade, Micah and I lived out at the southernmost tip of Brooklyn in a house crowded with other people’s furniture. We were legally prohibited from painting the walls or getting rid of the excess of knick-knacks because of some issue with the original owner’s will. It was a material abundance we were too young to deserve, to know what to do with. Sometimes when we didn’t want to do the dishes we’d go to the basement to dig out the silver cutlery of the elderly woman who had lived — and died — there before us.

I was too small for the size of our house, for the seriousness of Micah’s intentions, but maintained a steadfast ignorance of these facts, a quiet campaign of avoidance that I assumed was essential to all relationships. During the years we were together, I hardly went out at all, as if I was afraid that seeing what else and who else was out there might make it impossible to go home again.  In the end, it turned out I was right. Once I did start going out and seeing what else was there, I could not return to that house near the Verrazano, to Micah’s overwhelming affections, to our bed with the misshapen blue sheets we struggled to fit to the mattress each morning.

When I moved out, I found that everything I owned fit into the back of an SUV. This confirmation of my material compactness should have been a relief but instead I found it alarming, as if it indicated some other insignificance or inexperience. It seemed that in the absence of a love that had swelled up into all the corners of my being, into all the hours of my day, I was highly portable, my existence in one place — or with one person — more or less temporary.

Having a major space in your life suddenly vacated is no rarefied tragedy: it happens to most people, and likely more than once. But it takes a long time to fill that expanse inside you again, the minutes and habits and parts of yourself that used to be shared. This did not bother me then and it does not now: it’s a fact of a life in which you choose to love and I would not choose another kind.

+

The appeal of what came next was not that it was better — I knew from the start it wouldn’t be — but rather that it wasn’t as big, that it would in fact be so small, so insufficient, I could start restocking my life with other things again. I took long walks alone around the northern edges of Prospect Park the summer after I left. Everything felt simultaneously new and rusty: a rerouted commute on the same trains, the choreography of cooking old meals in a new kitchen, pacing unfamiliar streets until they became known. I was suddenly aware, too, that there was now a whole variety of experimental forms of pleasure available to me, minor and major, risky and not.

One of these, located somewhere on the axis of minor and risky, was Jonah. If there can be a single explanation for the trajectory of any love, it goes like this: it’s fun until it isn’t. Jonah was no exception.

The last time I recall feeling fondly towards him, early one evening in late summer, we were outside drinking Red Stripe and playing Scrabble. Jonah won the game by a huge margin and then confessed to cheating throughout, but with a grin I had noticed he employed specifically in instances where he wanted his behavior excused, not just with me but with everyone: his friends, family, employers, store clerks. It was an effective expression — humbly crooked but with eyebrows raised as if to say, “How could you not forgive me?” — but once you caught onto it, it was hard not to observe the frequency with which it appeared, and then not to wonder why he was constantly in need of forgiveness, or doing things that required it, however trivial.

I allowed him this for the reason I allowed him many things: it made me wonder. But after a while, to no one’s surprise — including my own — wonderment ceased to be enough, started, in actuality, to seem like an absurd premise for spending time with someone. We continued to become less tender to each other, until we were only capable of being pleasant after we had sex — although during the act we both managed to persist with our minor cruelties.

On another outdoor night, one of the last we spent lodged against each other in the hammock with string imprints forming on our cheeks, a few bats swooped down near our heads and we yelped simultaneously. I remember how embarrassed we both were in the moments afterward at our show of fright. In the whole history of bad things people have done to one other there is no accounting for what we choose to be ashamed of. There is also no accounting for what we choose to forgive.

On that same night, after the bats, I recall whispering, “I love you,” in the way I now can see many people do, when they have run out of other things to say to each other, or stopped looking for more precise ways of relating. But I knew as I said it that it was the only time I had ever lied about loving someone, and although I have done many other things wrong since — left a whole trail of different errors in my wake — I have never again done that.

+

Peter’s bed was so big I could lie across it horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, and still not reach the edges. I was very tired when I first arrived in it, but simultaneously having a lot of trouble sleeping. The exhaustion was a broad one, an encompassing uncertainty that made me lethargic and unproductive during the day but also unable to put my mind to rest when I turned off the lights. Peter’s main allure at this particular moment was that his sleep schedule was compatible with mine. We spent three weeks staying up all night talking and then more than a year trying to replicate the intimacy of those weeks, and for the most part, to everyone’s surprise — including our own — we actually succeeded.

In the months I spent camped out in his attic apartment, I rarely brought a change of clothes with me or used his shower, but I was closer to him than I’d ever been to someone else. As happens when you feel unchallenged in other aspects of your life, I rerouted my energies into conducting the relationship as a kind of experiment, testing out behaviors like jealousy and anger, from which I had so far mostly abstained. I had a hypothesis, which I announced to him often, that the ability to exercise these latent emotional muscles was proof of a deeper bond. This was met with minimal reception and was also never proven correct or incorrect, but it was certainly facilitated by the fact that we could sleep in the same bed after arguments without even noticing the other person was present.

Late in winter we both got sick for a month, shared a Neti Pot, let cough drop wrappers and Advil bottles and Kleenex pile up around us. We watched movies to rest our voices but could never make it through one without pausing to talk. Then we got better; it got warm. On weekday afternoons we went to a public water park to float down the lazy river while listening to the oldies station, toes hooked around each other’s tubes to keep from drifting. By then I had begun to worry that the lazy river days were symptomatic of something bigger, that Peter was in some abstract sense slow moving and was reducing my rate of acceleration by proxy — I would have generally preferred to swim laps — but our conversations were actually so rapid I could never figure out where to stop them.

I knew well the sheets on the cot that served as his couch; he slept there, not in his bed, when I wasn’t around. When I talk to him these days, I know he is lying on that cot, and I feel guilty — and then I don’t — for the excess of my own bed, the room I now have to spread out, how I wouldn’t exchange it for anything — or anyone — anymore.

+

The month or two that Ryan spent pursuing me, I spent much of my time hiding out in a large store in the Flatiron District where my cell phone got no reception. There I could thumb through racks of dresses I’d never wear and delay confronting his attempts to win me over. I put it off not because I didn’t enjoy them, but because I did, a great deal, and this was so unfamiliar a sensation to me, so unlike my customary ambivalence that I found it almost physically uncomfortable. To convince myself it was a good use of my time, I usually needed a drink in hand when I called him, leftover party gin in leftover plastic party cups I stacked on my windowsill after we hung up.

On New Year’s, after the countdown and the kiss, we locked ourselves in the bathroom at a party to take a nap. The tiles on the floor were the same as the ones in my mother’s house; my eyes blurred as I studied them. I slept with my head on Ryan’s hip. The rivets of his jeans left an imprint on my forehead.

Some time later we crash danced around my tiny bedroom, unsettling my precarious piles of books, knocking the cheap garment rack that served as my closet at an angle. We had a lot of fun together and not much else, which was the kind of less consuming experience I had believed I wanted but turned out was probably constitutionally incapable of. We fell asleep on top of the covers, this time with his chin on my shoulder, and in the morning we had sex.

“What do you want to do today?” Ryan asked afterwards, pulling on a t-shirt, and in response, without thinking even for a second, I said, “I think we should break up and also we should go to the Met.” Which is exactly what we did. Standing side by side in the American Wing, it was like nothing had ever happened, which seemed like a good sign. But generally this — the suggestion that nothing has changed, when things substantially have—is actually the deadliest sign of all.

Afterward he called me from California to say he wished I was there, which was what we both seemed to think I wanted to hear, but in that moment I realized it was not, that I did not in fact want to be in California at all, I wanted to be where I was: slightly but forgivably late for dinner with a friend across town, sprawled on my bed staring into the apartment across the street. This was a sight I now confronted more than any one person’s face and in truth I found it, in its total impenetrability, more compelling than the eyes and features I used to examine so often. Ryan said he had to go at the exact same moment I did. “I’ll call you later,” he said, and he didn’t, and I was surprised to discover how relieved I was by this, how much more I immediately liked him knowing that we were no longer in any way obligated to each other.

By now I hardly had any real obligations to anyone beyond whomever I promised to meet for a drink, go on a walk with, have over for a meal. I had expected to feel unmoored in the absence of a major commitment, but instead I felt flush with time, the very best kind of currency. I dispensed it freely to the people whose company I most appreciated, and in a very limited way to everyone else. I found this significantly more fulfilling—in reality it made me far less lonely — than I had when all the free hours of my day were accounted for, pre-allocated, in large part, to someone else.

+

On the days when the past sneaks up on me in a song or smell or unanticipated flash of nostalgia, on those occasions when I cannot help looking back, it is difficult not to be upset with myself for how I spent the first couple years of this decade and the last few of the previous one. I was frivolous with my time and money and body and energy during what could feasibly be the only period in my life when my time and money and body and energy are wholly mine and unshared.

By some combination of fortune and miracle, I managed to remain employed the whole time, avoid major financial trouble, and not get pregnant, in spite of expending the absolute minimum effort to prevent any of these undesirable outcomes. Perhaps it is as simple as this: there are periods in life when this is the most you can hope for, the absence of select failures, rather than solid accomplishments.

It is good to have this knowledge but what’s better still is exiting that kind of period and entering, by a similar combination of luck and chance, a new one.

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Brighton Beach. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Images by Louise Bourgeois.

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